The return of Aaron Sorkin's good-but-not-great series "The Newsroom" invokes memories of the days when Sorkin wrote much superior series, namely "The West Wing" and the even better "Sports Night."

"Sports Night" had a brief, tumultuous life on ABC, drawing generally excellent reviews but generally tiny audiences. Sorkin had wanted the show to eschew the then-mandatory laugh track; ABC said no for Season 1 but agreed to drop it for the second year.

"Sports Night" was the No. 65 prime-time show in its first season. Although the audience grew in Season 2, it wasn't enough for ABC to give it another year – a decision that had to have been influenced in part by Sorkin's new NBC series, "The West Wing," which had begun in fall 1999 and was outperforming "Sports Night" in the ratings.

Like "The Newsroom," "Sports Night" is set in a television news studio, but in this case it was sports news. Josh Charles (now of "The Good Wife") and Peter Krause ("Parenthood") were the anchors, and Felicity Huffman was their producer.

Of course, there was plenty of sports news and issues, but the focus of the series was on the often-twisted relationships behind the camera, particularly the never-quite-resolved romance between Krause's and Huffman's characters.

As with all Sorkin productions, the characters sounded pretty much the same and were prone to long speeches. But that was far more tolerable in the comic milieu of "Sports Night," where laughs were more important than preaching and we weren't overwhelmed by All That Seriousness.

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